“What do gloves, shoes, shotgun barrels, earplugs and skydiving parachutes have in common? They always, always, always travel in pairs–or you simply don’t use them.

“Though most of the uninitiated think that skydiving systems only include a single parachute, nothing could be farther from the truth. Sport skydivers have carried a reserve parachute along for the ride since the dawn of the sport in the 1950s….”

Is government this rudimentarily intelligent? Do they carry spares and backups – when spares and backups are absolutely necessary? Heavens no.

The same government that is this duplicative-ly stupid when it makes no sense whatsoever:

“The Pentagon is behind schedule in its effort to award a multi-billion dollar cloud computing contract over a lack of clarity in its request for proposals, and it’s come under fire from industry stakeholders for appearing to favor one company on the way.”

“Many vendors have publicly expressed unhappiness at the winner-take-all, single vendor approach, which they believe might be unfairly tilted toward market leader Amazon. Still, the DOD, which has stated that the process is open and fair, seems determined to take this path, much to the chagrin of most vendors, who believe that a multi-vendor strategy makes more sense.”

“Megalomaniacal internet retailer Amazon began as an online seller of books – as CEO Jeff Bezos once explained it to a horrified Kansas City bookseller – because it allowed the company to gather data on affluent, educated shoppers.

“The fact that the cloud’s $600 million budget will be parceled out from the CIA kitty over the next ten years, in some ways, confuses the issue.

“All 17 agencies that comprise the U.S. intelligence community will be making use of Amazon’s cloud, including, selected at random, the NSA, the DEA, the Department of the Treasury, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency, and Coast Guard Intelligence – which you’d think you would have heard of by now.”